I use them out of courtesy, to notice the person in front of the content that said content is (c) and that I actually did not forget to set a BSD/MIT/GPL/CC license, and/or to link to the actual license (which indeed leverages copyright).
Of course I know this is not needed from a legal PoV but I'm not using it for legal protection, I'm using it for actual humans to parse.
Also, the date metadata has been useful to me a few times. Please don't increment it automatically.
I use them out of courtesy, to notice the person in front of the content that said content is (c) and that I actually did not forget to set a BSD/MIT/GPL/CC license, and/or to link to the actual license (which indeed leverages copyright).
Of course I know this is not needed from a legal PoV but I'm not using it for legal protection, I'm using it for actual humans to parse.
Also, the date metadata has been useful to me a few times. Please don't increment it automatically.